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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

Mozilla Blocks Flash, Encourages HTML5 Adoption

Mozilla is encouraging developers towards HTML5 and JavaScript and away from Flash, after it blocked the plugin in browsers amid security concerns.

Following Adobe's advice that two critical vulnerabilities would potentially allow attackers to take control of affected systems, Mark Schmidt, Firefox's head of support, announced the move on Twitter.

Schmidt Tweeted: "BIG NEWS!! All versions of Flash are blocked by default in Firefox as of now." His message was shared more than 2,750 times.

On Hacker News, in the discussion Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default Schmidt explained that it was more accurate to call it "enforced click-to-activate" -- and that Firefox users could still opt-in to using Flash, saying user choice was the number one priority at Mozilla.

Schmidt said: "We regularly block vulnerable plugins. What made this block different was that we did it before Adobe made an update available. Now that Adobe has released an update, it is no longer true that every version of Flash Player is blocked in Firefox. However, we're glad to see the conversation this has sparked."

A few days ago we were notified of two vulnerabilities within the Flash Player. Upon investigation, we confirmed and fixed the issues, and took steps to ensure that this class of attack cannot be used as a future attack vector.

Flash Player is one of the most ubiquitous and widely distributed pieces of software in the world, and as such, is a target of malicious hackers. We are actively working to improve Flash Player security, and as we did in this case, will work to quickly address issues when they are discovered.

Mozilla aren't the only company critical of Flash this week. In a separate incident, Alex Stamos -- Facebook's new chief security officer -- tweeted it was time "for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash."

Technology should be replaced by better technology. I've written games for all kinds of platforms: Some of those platforms offer write once, run everywhere. On other platforms every device has it's own quirks and you have to test on every device and implement workarounds.

You might not like Flash, but it is great at running on every platform/browser with the same code base. If you test it on one platform, it runs on all others. (Adobe is also very good at keeping it backwards compatible)

Now, I ask you, what's the alternative for Flash? Does HTML5 offer write once, runs the same on every platform/browser(version!)? No it doesn't, and it never will.

Mozilla's director of product management, Chad Weiner, said that Mozilla "will continue to work with developers to encourage adoption of safer and more stable technologies, such as HTML5 and JavaScript, and we look forward to helping drive that conversation."